Alwen Pensarn

The novel deals with the relationship between the Romani people of North Wales, settled in the countryside since the seventeenth century and the Welsh families of Betws Gwerful Goch in 1913. They have lived alongside each other for 200 years, the Romani providing many agricultural services for the indigenous farmers. The Romani Wood family however, are also the custodians of a long musical and historical tradition expressed in the pure form of Romani language unchanged in Wales since Elizabethan times. Their encounters with John Sampson, a leading philologist from Liverpool University, who moved his family into the village in order to compile a Romani dictionary, prove to be mutually beneficial. The study of the language by academics and artists, especially in the 'kitchema' of the Hand Inn, provides the background for the cultural challenges that the three communities face, as they sing and dance, work, fight and make love just before the tide of history turns against them all.

My story follows the life of a poor Welsh farmer's daughter Alwen, as she encounters this era of vivid and seismic change and how she adapts emotionally and spiritually, escaping and then returning to find her true identity.

The book is in paperback and hardback.

 

That Damned Padre

This is my free-wheeling memoir which begins in the 1950's world of North London and ranges throughout my lifetime of memories. Memories always sit on a spectrum between truth and fiction and defy the concept of timelines. So this is something of a fairground ride reflecting the formative parts of my life, the fun and the fascination of growing up with deep reverence for the past and a slightly bewildered approach to the future.

In paperback and hardback.

 

 

.the book of islands.

A marriage of my open verse with my drawn images. Influences are from Wales and New Zealand, music and art. As usual with my poetry, the verse is intended to be spoken aloud. Poetry as with painting and drawing is a means for me to navigate and make sense of my own world, the worlds of my ancestors and lovers too. Often they fall upon a backdrop of apocalypse and isolation, both ever-present in modern life and especially so in my drawings. Islands are both a symbol of intense desire and unsettling disquiet and loneliness. I feel they have been significant points of reference in my life, I am always trying to navigate a safe voyage between them.

 

.the burning church.

My tribute to all the people that made me. I think we are the product of the landscape in which we live, the beauty of the natural world and our inheritance from the wonderful human history that has brought us here to this point. Then of course we are made by every small interaction with our fellow, present human beings for good or ill. In 2019 I drew together 26 of my paintings for an exhibition at Theatre Clwyd. It was over Christmas and so was deathly quiet apart from the school children who rushed past for the pantomime and pointed out the tits and bums joyfully to each other on the way. However to me it was a secret moment of inner peace and achievement which I wanted to mark with a book of poems that I have always liked and that read like the credits at the end of a film. I liked the feeling that the things I wanted to do most, as a maker of useless things, were done also to please the people that meant most to me and that had helped me along lifes rough old path. I made a list of them at the end of the book and bored them all with it for a few weeks. The verse is meant to be spoken and the language as rich as I could make it so that it would be sonorous and convey some honour to my teachers, my friends and my parents.

In paperback only due to its landscape form and printing cost.

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Post script

I may have two novels left in me, a biographical novel of my extraordinary aunt entitled 'Gladys' and a novel about a post third world war love affair called 'High Holborn' and I hope to produce many more drawings to accompany them.

Gladys

Follows the true life of a middle-class girl from Kent studying as a nurse in London during the Blitz. In 1947 she travels on a ship with Lady Strathearn to Cairo and thence to Palestine where she experiences first hand the horrors of terrorist warfare. She has many love affairs, culminating in one that is culturally unacceptable and that haunts the rest of her life. She leaves Palestine on the last ship out of Haifa before the founding of Israel and travels on to Malaya. Two life changing experiences ensue with the killing of her lover by communist bandits and her subsequent marriage to an abusive man that she idolises.

High Holborn

Two men undertake futile and casual work at a government facility in the few remaining buildings in London after a nuclear missile strike on the UK. This is the story of their time together in their office and how they navigate their relationships, their hopes, their psychological welfare against a backdrop of slow demise. A tale from the soft side of the apocalypse.

 

 

Well, I'm off for a walk. Bye for now.x